How to Make the Shift to Audience-First Planning with Emily Williams, Consumer Expert at MRI-Simmons

Streaming Overload By The Numbers

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:45

Did you know that the average American uses 11 different streaming services over the course of a year, or that 40% of adults feel completely overwhelmed by all of the choices that they have? Welcome to the State of Streaming podcast. Today we are joined by Emily Williams from MRI Stimm to discuss why the future of media planning relies on the consumer truth. We explore moving beyond basic impressions to truly understand the diverse behaviors and purchasing habits of the audience behind the screen. And if you want to stay ahead in the streaming landscape, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening to never miss an episode. Now let's dive into the conversation.

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 1:36

Thank you so much for having me.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:37

Can you tell us maybe, maybe in a word or two, who is

Why Consumer Truth Matters

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:42

MRI Simmons? What problem do you solve? Who do you solve that for?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 1:46

I'll probably use more than one or two words, but MRI Simmons is one of the leading consumer insights companies in the US. So we are helping brands, agencies, and media companies understand the American consumer through what is a nationally representative single source view of their behaviors, their attitudes, media consumption, and purchasing habits. And what really sets us apart is our commitment to what we call the consumer truth, where the consumer truth set.

How MRI-Simmons Measures Real People

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 2:20

Our data is built on what's called address-based probabilistic sampling, which is, you know, kind of the gold standard in research. But what that means is that we actually ensure that the people that we're measuring are real people, real households in the US. You know, these are not convenience panels of people who have opted in to do this. Like we're reaching directly to people in our households and making sure that that set accurately represents all the diversity and striations of the US population. And so we help marketers and media companies, you know, move beyond the impressions and exposures to really understand who the person is as a whole, who they're reaching, what they care about, what they buy, and how all of those behaviors connect in, you know, today's fragmented media landscape.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:10

And ultimately driving to that purchase, that's that's our goal as advertisers is to get a new customer, to get one of our best customers to come back and spend more money with us. But consumers don't think in terms of linear or streaming or social or digital. It's it's just all content. So why do you think do you do do you have a do you have a idea as to why the advertising industry kind of still plans and measures media the way that we do?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 3:38

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think it's part of its history. You know, for a long time, media channels were pretty distinct. You know, you had your TV team, your radio team, your print team, and consumers spent a lot of time in a relatively small number of places. And planning around channels made

Content First Behavior Breaks Old Planning

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 3:56

a lot of sense. But consumer behavior has really evolved much faster than the systems that we use to plan and measure it. So what we see is that today, people follow content and communities, not necessarily platforms. You remember, like when Netflix started their like streaming business and moved away from renting DVDs, like everybody was on Netflix. Everybody was saying, I'm gonna go watch Netflix, Netflix and chill. Totally. Like dude, they just went to the only option. It was the only option. And it was, I mean, it was a huge thing. And streaming was becoming a thing, streaming video. But today, like, that's not necessarily the case. People are going for content. They have a show they want to watch, they have a game they want to watch, you know, they'll go wherever they need to go to watch it. So we're not focused so much on the platform, we're seeking that content. You know, even looking at sports as an example, you know, thinking about like NFL fans. I recently wrote and published a blog on our website about the different activation windows of NFL fans with football season coming up. So this is top of mind for me. On game day, NFL fans are not like, you know, today I'm gonna consume linear TV, or today I'm gonna consume streaming. You know, they're saying I want to watch the game. So whether that game happens to be on broadcast or YouTube TV or Peacock or, you know, through highlights on social media, they're simply following the content wherever it goes. You know, that's where MRI Simmons has always had sort of a unique perspective because we've never looked at consumers through a lens of a single channel. You know, we look at the whole person. And so when you look at consumers that way, you start to realize that these channels are simply touch points along a much bigger journey.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 5:42

Sure. And thinking about something that is discussed more industry-wide, but but we've definitely touched on here on the podcast is the fragmentation of discovery. Have you uncovered any insights about how fragmentation and the challenge of discovery kind of plays into that?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 6:00

I mean, one insight, I think advertisers consistently like underestimate how difficult like true incremental reach had become, right? Like there's this tendency to think of streaming as like this giant pool of cord cutters. And the assumption is like if I add streaming to my media plan, I'm automatically adding a net new audience. But we know that's probably not true. At MRI Sem is we have this cord evolution study.

The Myth Of Easy Incremental Reach

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 6:27

It's one of our syndicated focus studies, which is like a topical study that we dive even deeper into a topic. We deliver it three times a year, and its focus is on how Americans engage with video content. And data in that study reveals that like 75% of Americans who have traditional cable and satellite TV also stream. So they're stackers. So if marketers have a streaming plan and a linear plan, chances are you're showing up in front of the same people. And what's more is I think I think you'll like the stats, the the average number of streaming services that Americans use in a typical year is 11. Wow. So yeah, and this is across that's one every month.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 7:12

That's a that's a new service that right, that is the churn conversation articulated.

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 7:18

And that's average. So sure, you'll have some people who are, you know, loyal to three or four, but then you have people using many more than 11. And this is across ad supported subscription services and fast channels, you know, and and others. But we know like consumers are moving fluidly across numerous platforms throughout the course of the week, often multiple times a day. So, what could look like incremental reach is really you're you're reaching the same audience repeatedly in different environments. So, you know, just because a campaign is running across five different platforms doesn't mean you're reaching five different groups of people. There's likely significant overlap. And once you factor in things like shared devices in the household, multiple devices per person, like it becomes even harder to know how much truly incremental reach you're generating. And so that's why audience understanding has become so important, you know, because before asking, like, how many platforms should I buy, marketers should be asking, like, who am I trying to reach and where are they already being reached? Because the goal isn't simply to add more impressions, it's, you know, to find the consumers you haven't reached yet. You know, so let's say like I'm targeting a specific segment for my campaign. If they're already heavy users of streaming and social video and YouTube, adding another streaming platform might not create nearly as much reach as I expect. But on the other hand, if I understand where gaps exist in their media consumption or where they're less likely to be, I can make smarter decisions about where to invest next. And that's really where consumer insights come into play.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 8:53

That's a massive nugget just right there, Emily. I'm curious if if maybe the inverse, is there a metric that you think we can throw out or that we we should be disregarding?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 9:05

Oh man, that's there could be a few things you're asking me. A metric that I'd eliminate, or maybe let's let's say a metric that maybe I stopped using in isolation. Let's say like that. A metric that stop using in isolation is like total minutes viewed.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 9:25

Why?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 9:26

Not not because it's useless, you know, it absolutely has value, but because we've allowed it to become a proxy for success when by itself it doesn't really tell us very much. Like for creator

Minutes Viewed Is Not The Goal

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 9:39

content, like a lot of creators have to hit a certain threshold of minutes viewed to unlock monetization. And large streaming services use total hours viewed as like their primary KPI. And hearing something that like received 10 billion minutes viewed, that's amazing. But my first question is always so what? You know, did did the content reach the right people? Did it introduce a new brand? Did it change behaviors? You know, were viewers actually paying attention and engaging with the content? You know, like I can't even tell you how many times I have something playing on the TV while I'm cooking dinner. So, you know, it's just background noise. It's just background noise, you know. So, you know, minutes view doesn't equal engagement and attention. In fact, our USA study data, which is our core MRI Simmons product, is our USA study. We reveal that over 60%, I think it's like 63% of adults say that when they're watching TV, they're usually doing other activities. So that tells me like attention is like that 63% for sure. That's what I'm saying. Me too. Like cooking, crafting, doing stuff, cleaning, you know, it tells us that like, and people are aware of this too. This people have reported this. So at least that there's an awareness of this, you know, and this tells us that attention is likely not as high as we like to think it is. So minutes viewed can answer a lot of questions, you know, what platforms they're on, how long they're on, but it can't answer everything by itself. You know, let's say a campaign generates a hundred million minutes feud among people who have no interest in my category. Another generates only 20 million minutes among high value prospects, you know, which campaign is better. So, you know, if we're only looking at viewing minutes, we choose the first one every time, but we know that's the wrong answer. And this is where audience understanding becomes so important because, you know, exposure and minutes viewed and attention are all valuable, but none of those metrics tell you whether you're connecting with the people who matter most to your business. And that's why we spend so much time helping marketers understand the person behind the impression. So if I could wave a magic wand and, you know, I'd add to every one of those headlines that talks about total view time and total hours viewed, I would add, you know, who were the people we actually reached and why did they matter to my business? Because once you know that, the number becomes a lot more meaningful.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 12:17

Can first party data is there a role for first party data to help solve some of this?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 12:23

Yeah. I mean, first party data is incredibly valuable. You know, if I were a streaming platform, I absolutely want to leverage every signal I have available, of course. The reality is that these companies, you know, these streaming platforms, they can see an enormous amount of what happens inside their ecosystems. You know, they know what people are watching, when, how often, if they completed a show, if they stopped halfway through. And those are all incredibly powerful signals. But every platform has the same challenge. They only see that piece of the consumer's life. You know,

First-Party Data Needs More Context

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 13:01

for example, a platform might know that I watched a music documentary, that I streamed three video podcasts this week, and that I spend a lot of time watching game show content during my lunch breaks. That's useful. But it can't tell you that I'm planning a trip to Italy this summer, which is true. That I'm preparing home renovations, that I've recently purchased my first electric vehicle. You know, those are the kinds of attributes that advertisers. Congrats. Thank you. You know, those are the kinds of attributes that advertisers really want to know. And that's, I think, where MRI Simmons, my company, comes in and fits into this like first party data world. Our role is to provide the consumer context around those media behaviors. So we help marketers understand not just what people are doing, but who they are and what they buy and how all of those behaviors connect across channels. So rather than thinking of like first-party data versus consumer insights, I think the future is really about combining the two. We launched a product a couple of years ago called Consumer Canvas. And Consumer Canvas is a data enrichment solution that helps marketers bring consumer intelligence, our consumer intelligence into their own first-party data. It's built on our core USA study. And it uses an identity framework that brings like over 60,000 of those more fun attributes, those Italy, easy, you know, all those fun things to a population scale of over 250 million adults. So, you know, maybe a platform's customer file might tell you that they subscribed to their streaming service or they watched a certain program. Data enrichment can help you understand well, they are luxury travelers, they are sports enthusiasts, they are heavy restaurant goers or, you know, any number of dimensions that actually impact real purchasing decisions. And what I love about this approach is that it's not about replacing first-party data. It has a that has a huge role, but it's about making first-party data smarter. And I think that's the future. Because when you combine those two things, that's when audience understanding gets really powerful.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:26

We've got all this data. We know it's super valuable, but actually doing something with it, that that sounds like the application that you're driving to. And we hear a lot about this idea of a unified audience, which I think from from an abber advertising perspective, we would just love to see, hey, who saw our ads and bought a thing? Does the unified audience does it does it mean more than that?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 15:51

Yeah, I I think so. I mean, I think I yeah, I think I hear people use a phrase like unified audience view and they talk about it like it's a technology problem. But in practice, it's a consumer problem. You know, consumers, they don't wake up and think, oh, today I'm a streaming viewer, or I'm a

Unified Audience Is A People Problem

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 16:10

podcast listener, or I'm a, you know, social media user, which is how we tend to define them in the industry. Consumers are just moving about their day, you know? So they might, you know, watch a show on Hulu in the morning, listen to a podcast on their commute, they're scrolling Instagram at lunch, they're watching a game on ESPN, and then they buy something on Amazon before they go to bed. You know, from their perspective, that's a normal person having a normal day. But from the industry's perspective, those are often like five different data sets. So to me, a truly unified audience view means being able to connect all of those touch points back to a real human being and understand them consistently, no matter where they're engaging. You know, so instead of saying, here's my social media audience and here's my podcast audience, you're able to say, this is a group of consumers who are likely auto buyers, or these are affluent travelers planning a vacation in the next year. You know, suddenly the audience becomes the organizing principle instead of the channel that you're on. And that's actually one of the reasons MRI Simmons has been so valuable to marketers for decades. You know, our data has always been built around people, not platforms. And our research in our USA study can actually tell you that, you know, nearly 90% of Instagram users shop on Amazon, or half of Amazon shoppers watch Hulu. But more than that, we see that nearly half of Instagram users say they're likely to take an international vacation in the next year. And a third of Hulu viewers are in market for a new car. So, you know, those are all real stats that we have access to. So a unified audience view, I think, means having a full understanding of the person and all of their behaviors behind the click. Fascinating.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:07

I'm curious, Emily, if we look three years forward from now, what's something that we will look back on as maybe we got this part wrong?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 18:16

Oh, oh goodness. This is something I've been uh talking about with my team a lot recently. I think three years from now, we will look back and realize that we confused more choice with a better experience. For years, I think, you know, the streaming industry has operated under this assumption that consumers want unlimited options. They want more services, more content, more everything. And to be fair, consumers do, for the most part, you know, they absolutely wanted more choice than they had in traditional cable.

Too Much Choice Becomes A UX Problem

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 18:52

But I think we've reached the point where too much of a good thing can become overwhelming. Our research reveals that 40% of adults often feel overwhelmed with choice when it comes to watching TV and video content. Two in five are overwhelmed. Think about that. You know, that that wasn't I know that wasn't a conversation we were having 10, 15 years ago, you know? And I don't know about you, Tim, but like I've had plenty of nights where I've spent 20 minutes scrolling through titles, watching trailers, and ultimately like ended up putting on New Girl for the hundredth time. And I don't think that's unusual. I think we have access to more content than ever before, yet people are spending more time deciding what they actually want to watch than watching it. And I think, I think SaaS channels are a great example of this. You know, on one hand, they've made streaming more accessible and created tremendous opportunities for advertisers. But as hundreds of channels continue to launch, I think the industry needs to ask itself kind of a difficult question. At what point does adding more inventory stop creating value for consumers? We measure in our core evolution study that I mentioned, you know, we measure 170 fast channels. And that's just fat. That's free as supported streaming TV. You know, that's not subscription services or network app, which we cover like over 170 more of. And new, new fat channels are being added to our measurement every wave three times a year. So I think an important thing to think about is like consumers don't wake up hoping for another 50 channels to evaluate. You know, they wake up wanting to be entertained and informed.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 20:40

So true.

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 20:40

With with yeah, with as little friction as possible. And that's that's where I think it this tied back to sort of the broader conversation we've been having is I think I think the industry has spent a lot of time optimizing content distribution and inventory expansion, but it hasn't spent enough time understanding how people actually make choices. The challenge right now is I think helping the right person find the right content at the right moments. So getting back to what you were saying about like a discovery problem, you know, that's ultimately an audience understanding problem. So if I had to make a prediction, I think that we'll look back and kind of laugh at how, you know, fragmentation wasn't really a measurement problem or a media planning problem. It was a consumer experience problem. You know, we gave people so many options that um finding something worth watching became work. And when that happens, people retreat to what's familiar instead of discovering something new.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 21:40

There's a reason that when we go out to eat, there's a there's a menu with a limited number of options, right? To force a choice. It's not an infinite run-on. Well, we could make you anything that combines these few ingredients. That's that's really interesting, about too much choice. My my son's on summer vacation and he's 13, he's hanging out watching TV, and then he turned off the TV and kind of a complaint. Like, I can't find anything to watch. And I thought to myself, that's so interesting. I think 13-year-old Tim also had the same complaint, but it's completely different now, right? Like we were limited to a certain number of channels, now it's nearly infinite, but the same challenge remains, which is I can't find anything to watch. So that will be uh that will be something interesting to come back and check on in a few years. I'm curious, Emily.

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 22:32

Yeah, we're just paralyzed totally.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:34

If you had a magic wand, this is this is a fun question. If you had a magic wand that you could wave and solve a problem for for everyone, for the streaming platform. Advertisers, agencies, what would it be?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 22:50

I think I'll risk being repetitive and say that I would solve for a common understanding of their ideal audience. Because when I listen to conversations with media companies across the industry, you know, I hear incredibly smart people talking about reach and attention, outcomes, personalization, you know, but underneath all those conversations is the same like fundamental

A Shared Audience Definition Fixes More

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 23:19

question. It's like, who are we actually trying to reach? And surprisingly often, you know, different organizations are answering that question differently. An automaker might define a potential customer differently than an agency or a nonprofit or a streamer, you know, and before you've even started the campaign, you've created friction. So everyone's working hard, but they're not always working from the same understanding of the consumer. And one of the things I've learned working in consumer insights is that when everyone agrees on the audience or, you know, how we're going to define our ideal audience, a lot of other problems become easier to solve. You know, planning it's easier, targeting it easier, even creative gets better because you're developing messaging for like a clearly defined person rather than chasing KPIs. You know, think about how much industry or energy the industry spends trying to connect their platforms and IDs and data sets. And those are important challenges. But at the end of the day, you know, consumers don't experience any of that complexity. They don't know what's going on behind the scenes. They're just people trying to watch content and get their information and be entertained. So the closer we can align our data and measurement systems around those real people, the more effective the entire ecosystem becomes. And honestly, that's what I love about the work we do at MRI Simmons. You know, at our core, we're helping marketers understand the consumer behind the click, behind the impression. Because whether the content is delivered through linear or streaming or whatever comes next, it's still the same human being on the other side. You know, as we've, you know, established technology and platforms will continue to be introduced and to change, but understanding people will always matter.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 25:10

Emily, I couldn't think of a better place to end it. If folks want to learn more about MRI Simmons, maybe check out some of the great work that you do, where should they go?

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 25:18

Well, they should go to MRI Simmons.com. They should follow MRI Simmons on LinkedIn. I am very involved in some of our product marketing. So I I'm constantly writing blogs, I'm recording videos, and they're all put on the MRI Simmons LinkedIn page and on the website. So check us out. If you want some free insights on a ton of different topics, please check us out and um send us a message. We'd love to chat.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 25:42

It's great content. You're taking a very modern approach to something that may have traditionally been thought of as kind of boring and stuffy. It's research, it's audience, but like you're putting a really cool spin on it that makes it super consumable

Where To Learn More From MRI-Simmons

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 25:55

for anyone, whether you're under day one of your media journey or you're a seasoned operator. It's a it's a great output. We love it. Emily, thanks so much for being here.

Emily Williams, MRI-Simmons 26:05

Thank you so much for having me. I had a good time.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 26:07

If you found this conversation to be helpful, please share with a colleague or a client. Start a conversation yourself today, and we'll see y'all next time.